Wireless communications services are provided in different forms. For example, in satellite mobile communications, communications links are provided by satellite to mobile users. In land mobile communications, communications channels are provided by base stations to the mobile users. In PCS, communications are carried out in microcell or picocell environments, including outdoors and indoors. Regardless the forms they are in, wireless telecommunication services are provided through radio links, where information such as voice and data is transmitted via modulated electromagnetic waves. That is, regardless of their forms, all wireless communications services are subjected to vagaries of the propagation environments.
The most adverse propagation effect from which wireless communications systems suffer is the multipath fading. Multipath fading, which is usually caused by the destructive superposition of multipath signals reflected from various types of objects in the propagation environments, creates errors in digital transmission. One of the common methods used by wireless communications engineers to combat multipath fading is the antenna diversity technique, where two or more antennas at the receiver and/or transmitter are so separated in space or polarization that their fading envelopes are de-correlated. If the probability of the signal at one antenna being below a certain level is p (the outage probability), then the probability of the signals from L identical antennas all being below that level is pL. Thus, since p<1, combining the signals from several antennas reduces the outage probability of the system. The essential condition for antenna diversity schemes to be effective is that sufficient de-correlation of the fading envelopes be attained.
A classical combining technique is the maximum-ratio combining (MRC) where the signals from received antenna elements are weighted such that the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of their sum is maximized. The MRC technique has been shown to be optimum if diversity branch signals are mutually uncorrelated and follow a Rayleigh distribution. However, the MRC technique has so far been used exclusively for receiving applications. As there are more and more emerging wireless services, more and more applications may require diversity at the transmitter or at both transmitter and receiver to combat severe fading effects. As a result, the interest in transmit diversity has gradually been intensified. Various transmit diversity techniques have been proposed but these transmit diversity techniques were built on objectives other than to maximize the SNR. Consequently, they are sub-optimum in terms of SNR performance.